BOMBSHELL: Associated Press 'willingly cooperated' with Nazis to crush freedom of the press just as they suppress narrative questioning Big Pharma today

Tuesday, April 12, 2016 by: J. D. Heyes
Tags: Associated Press, Nazi Germany, propaganda mouthpiece

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(NaturalNews) During the rise of Nazi Germany, The Associated Press (AP) willingly cooperated with Adolf Hitler's Third Reich, submitting to dramatic restrictions on freedom of the press and providing the regime with images from the news service's photo archives so they could be used in anti-Semitic and anti-Western propaganda, according to a new report.

As noted by the Times of Israel, when Hitler's National Socialists rose to power in 1933, every international news agency save the U.S.-based AP, which was founded in 1846, was ordered to leave Germany; the AP continued to operate in Nazi Germany until 1941, when America declared war on the Axis following Japan's "surprise attack" on Pearl Harbor.

According to German historian Harriet Scharnberg, what is now the world's largest news organization was only permitted to remain in Germany because it agreed to a deal with the Nazi regime.

Photos used in anti-Jewish 'subhuman' propaganda pamphlets

In doing so, the AP lost control over its own copy by submitting to the Schriftleitergesetz or "Editor's Law." The news agency agreed not to publish any material "calculated to weaken the strength of the Reich abroad or at home," she wrote in a piece for the academic journal Studies in Contemporary History. Her research was first reported by the UK's Guardian newspaper.

According to The Guardian, the Nazi Editor's Law forced AP employees to contribute material for the National Socialist Party's propaganda machine, which Hitler entrusted to his longtime friend and confidant Joseph Goebbels. One of four photographers who worked for the AP in the 1930s was Franz Roth, a member of the SS paramilitary unit's propaganda division, whose photos were handpicked by the Nazi leader himself.

The AP's photos went on to appear in a number of Nazi regime propaganda publications, including a 52-page SS pamphlet called The Subhuman. That said, most of the AP photos appeared in a separate pamphlet titled Jews in the U.S.; the former pamphlet carried the second-highest number of AP photos, The Guardian reported.

Some have speculated that the AP agreed to the Nazi deal in order to provide the West a "peek into a repressive society that may otherwise have been entirely hidden from view," the paper reported. But alternately, the deal also gave the Nazis a means of covering up their war crimes, say others.

In an interview with The Guardian, Scharnberg said that the cooperation with a prestigious American news agency gave Hitler a platform to portray his "war of extermination as a conventional war."

'We reject any suggestion...'

"Instead of printing pictures of the days-long Lviv pogroms with its thousands of Jewish victims, the American press was only supplied with photographs showing the victims of the Soviet police and 'brute' Red Army war criminals," Scharnberg, a historian at Halle's Martin Luther University, told the paper, in reference to just one example of the AP aiding the Nazi regime.

"To that extent it is fair to say that these pictures played their part in disguising the true character of the war led by the Germans," she added. "Which events were made visible and which remained invisible in AP's supply of pictures followed German interests and the German narrative of the war."

In response to an inquiry from The Guardian about its alleged cooperation with the Nazis, The Associated Press vowed to look into the charge, but a statement from the news agency expressed extreme doubt that it would have deliberately done so.

"An accurate characterization is that the AP and other foreign news organizations were subjected to intense pressure from the Nazi regime from the year of Hitler's coming to power in 1932 until the AP's expulsion from Germany in 1941. AP management resisted the pressure while working to gather accurate, vital and objective news in a dark and dangerous time," the agency stated.

Later, the AP issued a lengthier statement saying it "rejects the suggestion that it collaborated with the Nazi regime at any time."

Sources:

TimesOfIsrael.com

Zeithistorische-Forschungen.de

TheGuardian.com